Perceptions of American and Russian environmental scientists of today’s key environmental issues: a comparative analysis

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The idea for this paper came to me as I was preparing a series of lectures on global environmental issues. During preparation of the course, the author observed that theories on global environmental issues differ greatly with respect to their level of scientific confirmation. The arguments supporting climate change, for example, looked to the author much more solidly grounded than those supporting “desertification”. Subsequently, the author visited the USA, spending several months as a Fulbright fellow at New York University (NYU). There he met several prominent American environmental scientists from different academic institutions. In a series of short interviews with these scientists, the author discussed their views as to the level of confirmation of key global environmental issues – climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, desertification, deforestation and biodiversity loss. These discussions brought two surprises. The first was the absence of any substantial difference among the views of those interviewed. Despite differences in expertise and background, the researchers (among them, biologists, hydrologists, climatologists and philosophers) were in agreement that only a few concepts of global environmental issues deserve a high degree of confidence. The second surprise came with realizing that their position is very close to the author’s: that he then believed was too skeptical to be shared by so many experts. On his return to Russia the author did the same interviews with Russian environmental scientists who were known to be active researchers with wide horizons. Once again, the results were surprising in the sense that the authors found a complete reversal in the ranking of the global issues. In my publication I wanted to explain this striking difference.

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